Unloose it, unloose it, in a certain ocean, and a certain time, that I know.

Though you turn, for my answer to the narwhal’s malicious ivory,

I say that you wait for a darker reply,

how the sea-unicorn suffered the lance.

It may be you question the halcyon’s plumage,

tremoring,

in the pure womb of the southern seas?

Now, on the crystalline house of the polyp you twine

new demands, threshing it to the husk?

You want to know the matter electric, caught on the forks of the deep?

The stalactite’s armour that extends as crystal?

The spear of the angler-fish, the music stretched-out

in the gulf, like a thread amongst waters?

I say to you that the ocean knows it, the life

of its circlings vast as the sands, pure and innumerable,

and between the red vine-clusters, time has brightened

the stone of the petals, the light of medusas,

and the branches are threshed in the web of the corals,

from the flowing horn’s infinite nacre.

I am the empty net that hangs,

beyond men, rendered dead by the shadowy waters,

fingers grown used to the triangle, measured

by the shy hemisphere of orange-flowers.

I came, like you, penetrating

the interminable starlight,

in the net of the self, in the night, and found naked self.

the sole catch, the fish noosed in the wind.

Ode to a Naked Beauty

With chaste heart, and pure

eyes

I celebrate you, my beauty,

restraining my blood

so that the line

surges and follows

your contour,

and you bed yourself in my verse,

as in woodland, or wave-spume:

earth’s perfume,

sea’s music.

Nakedly beautiful,

whether it is your feet, arching

at a primal touch

of sound or breeze,

or your ears,

tiny spiral shells

from the splendour of America’s oceans.

Your breasts also,

of equal fullness, overflowing

with the living light

and, yes,

winged

your eyelids of silken corn

that disclose

or enclose

the deep twin landscapes of your eyes.

The line of your back

separating you

falls away into paler regions

then surges

to the smooth hemispheres

of an apple,

and goes splitting

your loveliness

into two pillars

of burnt gold, pure alabaster,

to be lost in the twin clusters of your feet,

from which, once more, lifts and takes fire

the double tree of your symmetry:

flower of fire, open circle of candles,

swollen fruit raised

over the meeting of earth and ocean.

Your body – from what substances

agate, quartz, ears of wheat,

did it flow, was it gathered,

rising like bread

in the warmth,

and signalling hills

silvered,

valleys of a single petal, sweetnesses

of velvet depth,

until the pure, fine, form of woman

thickened

and rested there?

It is not so much light that falls

over the world

extended by your body

its suffocating snow,

as brightness, pouring itself out of you,

as if you were

burning inside.

Under your skin the moon is alive.

‘In the wave-strike over unquiet stones’

IX From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

In the wave-strike over unquiet stones

the brightness bursts and bears the rose

and the ring of water contracts to a cluster

to one drop of azure brine that falls.

O magnolia radiance breaking in spume,

magnetic voyager whose death flowers

and returns, eternal, to being and nothingness:

shattered brine, dazzling leap of the ocean.

Merged, you and I, my love, seal the silence

while the sea destroys its continual forms,

collapses its turrets of wildness and whiteness,

because in the weft of those unseen garments

of headlong water, and perpetual sand,

we bear the sole, relentless tenderness.

‘I can write the saddest lines tonight’

XX From:’ Veinte poemas de amor’

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

Write for example: ‘The night is fractured

and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’

The night wind turns in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like these I held her in my arms.

I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her.

Hear the vast night, vaster without her.

Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.

What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her.

The night is fractured and she is not with me.

That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off,

my soul is not content to have lost her.

As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.

My heart looks for her: she is not with me

The same night whitens, in the same branches.

We, from that time, we are not the same.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her.

Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms,

my soul is not content to have lost her.

Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer,

and these are the last lines I will write for her.

‘Leaning into the afternoon’

VII From:’ Veinte poemas de amor’

Leaning into the afternoon, I cast my saddened nets,

towards your oceanic eyes.

There, in the highest fire, my solitude unrolls and ignites,

arms flailing like a drowning man’s.

I send out crimson flares across your distant eyes,

that swell like the waves, at the base of a lighthouse.

You only guard darkness, far-off woman of mine,

from your gaze the shore of trepidation sometimes emerges.

Leaning towards afternoon, I fling my saddened nets,

into the sea, your eyes of ocean trouble.

The night-birds peck at the early stars,

that glitter as my soul does, while it loves you.

The night gallops, on its mare of shadows,

spilling blue silken tassels of corn, over the fields.

The Eighth of September

From: ‘Versos del capitán’

This day, Today, was a brimming glass.

This day, Today, was an immense wave.

This day was all the Earth.

This day, the storm-driven ocean

lifted us up in a kiss

so exalted we trembled

at the lightning flash

and bound as one, fell,

and drowned, without being unbound.

This day our bodies grew

stretched out to Earth’s limits,

orbited there, melded there

to one globe of wax, or a meteor’s flame.

A strange door opened, between us,

and someone, with no face as yet,

waited for us there.

‘Perhaps not to be is to be without your being.’

LXIX From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,

without your going, that cuts noon light

like a blue flower, without your passing

later through fog and stones,

without the torch you lift in your hand

that others may not see as golden,

that perhaps no one believed blossomed

the glowing origin of the rose,

without, in the end, your being, your coming

suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,

blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:

and it follows that I am, because you are:

it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:

and, because of love, you will, I will,

We will, come to be.

‘Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,’

XII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,

dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,

what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?

What primal night does Man touch with his senses?

Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,

through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:

Love is a war of lightning,

and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.

Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,

your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,

and a genital fire, transformed by delight,

slips through the narrow channels of blood

to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,

to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.

‘The tree is here, still, in pure stone’

XVI: From: ‘Las Piedras del Cielo’

The tree is here, still, in pure stone,

in deep evidence, in solid beauty,

layered, through a hundred million years.

Agate, cornelian, gemstone

transmuted the timber and sap

until damp corruptions

fissured the giant’s trunk

fusing a parallel being:

the living leaves

unmade themselves

and when the pillar was overthrown

fire in the forest, blaze of the dust-cloud,

celestial ashes mantled it round,

until time, and the lava, created

this gift, of translucent stone.

Your hands

From: ‘Versos del capitán’

When your hands leap

towards mine, love,

what do they bring me in flight?

Why did they stop

at my lips, so suddenly,

why do I know them,

as if once before,

I have touched them,

as if, before being,

they travelled

my forehead, my waist?

Their smoothness came

winging through time,

over the sea and the smoke,

over the Spring,

and when you laid

your hands on my chest

I knew those wings

of the gold doves,

I knew that clay,

and that colour of grain.

The years of my life

have been roadways of searching,

a climbing of stairs,

a crossing of reefs.

Trains hurled me onwards

waters recalled me,

on the surface of grapes

it seemed that I touched you.

Wood, of a sudden,

made contact with you,

the almond-tree summoned

your hidden smoothness,

until both your hands

closed on my chest,

like a pair of wings

ending their flight.

Enigma with Flower

Victory. It has come late, I had not learnt

how to arrive, like the lily, at will,

the white figure, that pierces

the motionless eternity of earth,

pushing at clear, faint, form,

till the hour strikes: that clay,

with a white ray, or a spur of milk.

Shedding of clothing, the thick darkness of soil,

on whose cliff the fair flower advances,

till the flag of its whiteness

defeats the contemptible deeps of night,

and, from the motion of light,

spills itself in astonished seed.

‘I like you calm, as if you were absent’

XV From:’ Veinte poemas de amor’

I like you calm, as if you were absent,

and you hear me far-off, and my voice does not touch you.

It seems that your eyelids have taken to flying:

it seems that a kiss has sealed up your mouth.

Since all these things are filled with my spirit,

you come from things, filled with my spirit.

You appear as my soul, as the butterfly’s dreaming,

and you appear as Sadness’s word.

I like you calm, as if you were distant,

you are a moaning, a butterfly’s cooing.

You hear me far-off, my voice does not reach you.

Let me be calmed, then, calmed by your silence.

Let me commune, then, commune with your silence,

clear as a light, and pure as a ring.

You are like night, calmed, constellated.

Your silence is star-like, as distant, as true.

I like you calm, as if you were absent:

distant and saddened, as if you were dead.

One word at that moment, a smile, is sufficient.

And I thrill, then, I thrill: that it cannot be so.

‘Tie your heart at night to mine, love,’

LXXIX From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Tie your heart at night to mine, love,

and both will defeat the darkness

like twin drums beating in the forest

against the heavy wall of wet leaves.

Night crossing: black coal of dream

that cuts the thread of earthly orbs

with the punctuality of a headlong train

that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.

Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,

to the grip on life that beats in your breast,

with the wings of a submerged swan,

So that our dream might reply

to the sky’s questioning stars

with one key, one door closed to shadow.

‘You will recall the gorge of capricious waters’

IV From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

You will recall the gorge of capricious waters

from which throbbing perfumes climbed,

and a bird, from time to time, clothed

with liquid slowness: winter plumage.

You will recall the gifts of the earth:

hot scents, clay of gold,

scrub grasses, mad roots,

bewitched thorns like swords.

You will recall the branch you bore,

branch of shadow and water of silence

branch like a stone of spume.

And that time was as never and always:

we go there where nothing does not await us,

and find all that is waiting there.

‘Oh love, oh mad light-beam, threat of violet’

XXXVII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Oh love, oh mad light-beam, threat of violet,

you visit me, and climb, by your cool stairway

the tower that time has crowned with mist,

the ashen walls of an enclosed heart.

No one will know it was grace alone,

constructed crystals strong as citadels

and blood opened desolate tunnels

without its sovereignty dispelling winter.

So, love: your mouth, skin, light, sorrows,

were the bequest of life, the sacred

gifts of the rainfall, and of nature

that receives and lifts the weight of seed,

the hidden tumult of wine in casks,

the blaze of wheat under the ground.

‘For you to hear me....’

V From: ‘Veinte poemas de amor’

For you to hear me

my words

thin themselves out, at times,

like the trails of gulls on the shore.

A necklace of bones, a crazed rattle

for your fingers smooth as grapes.

And I look at my words from a distance.

More than mine they are yours.

Like tendrils they climb my ancient suffering.

They climb, like this, inside damp walls.

It is you the guilty one in this blood-wet round.

They are escaping from my dark covert.

You pervade everything, you, pervade everything.

They live, before you, in the solitude you enter,

and are accustomed, more than you, to my sadnesses.

Now I want them to say what I want them to tell you,

for you to hear as I want you to hear me.

The winds of misery may still bring them down.

Hurricanes of dream may still make them tumble.

You attend other voices, in my voice of pain,

Cries, of ancient mouths: blood, of ancient pleas.

Love me. Don’t leave me, friend. Follow me.

Follow me, friend, in this wave of misery.

They go on being miserly, with your love, my words.

You enter everything, you, enter everything.

I make, out of all this, an infinite necklace,

for your white fingers, smooth as grapes.

El Lago de los Cisnes

From: ‘Memorial de Isla Negra’

Lake Budi, sombre, dark heavy stone,

unburied water between high forest,

there you opened, like a subterranean door,

near the solitary sea at the end of the Earth.

We galloped over the infinite sands

joined to the flowing richness of spume,

not a house, not a man, not a horse,

only time going by, and that green and white shore,

that ocean.

Then towards hills, and, of a sudden,

the lake, a solid, secretive water,

compact light, gem of an earthly ring.

A flight, white and black: swans being banished,

long necks of nocturnal darkness, webs of scarlet skin,

and the clear snow flying over the world.

O flight from water’s meaning,

thousand bodies destined to beauty unshaken

like the lake’s pellucid permanence.

Suddenly, the whole, was a rush over water,

motion, sound, turrets of full moon,

and then wild wings making order from whirlwind,

a grandeur, flying, a beating,

and then, absence, white tremor of void.

‘From the archipelago you have hair of larch fibres,’

XXX from: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

From the archipelago you have hair of larch fibres,

flesh that was realised by aeons of time,

veins that have known oceans of timber,

green blood dropped from the sky into memory.

No one can recapture my heart, lost

among so many roots, in the bitter cool

of the sun’s rays multiplied by seething of waters:

there lives the shadow that does not depart with me.

So you rose out of the South like an islet,

crowned, populated, by plumage and timber,

and I sensed the fragrance of wandering woodland.

I found the dark honey I knew in the forest,

and touched at your hips the petals of shadow

that were born with me and that formed my soul.

‘The little girl made of timber didn’t arrive by walking:’

LXVIII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

(Figurehead from a ship)

The little girl made of timber didn’t arrive by walking:

there she was, all of a sudden, sitting among the cobbles,

ancient flowers, of the sea, were a coronet on her forehead,

her gaze was filled by deep rooted sadness.

There she rested, gazing, at our empty existence,

the doing, and being, and going, and coming, all over Earth,

and day was discolouring its measure of petals.

She watched us, without seeing, the girl-child of timber.

The girl-child who was crowned by the ancient waters,

sat there gazing, with eyes overwhelmed:

she knew we are living in a distant trawl-net,

of time, and water, and waves, and sounds, and rain,

and don’t know if we’re beings, or if we are her dreaming.

This is the fable of the girl who’s made of timber.

Walking Around

From: ‘Residencia en la tierra II’

It so happens I’m tired of being a man.

It so happens I enter clothes shops and movie-houses,

withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt

sailing the water of ashes and origins.

The smell of a hairdresser’s has me crying and wailing.

I only want release from being stone or wool.

I only want not to see gardens and businesses,

merchandise, spectacles, lifts.

It so happens I’m tired of my feet and toenails,

my hair and my shadow.

It so happens I’m tired of being a man.

Still it would be a pleasure

to scare a lawyer with a severed lily

or deal death to a nun with a poke in the ear.

It would be good

to go through the streets with an emerald knife

and shout out till I died of cold.

I don’t want to go on being just a root in the shadows,

vacillating, extended, shivering with dream,

down in the damp bowels of earth,

absorbing it, thinking it, eating it every day.

I don’t want to be so much misfortune,

I don’t want to go on as a root or a tomb,

a subterranean tunnel, just a cellar of death,

frozen, dying in pain.

This is why, Monday, the day, is burning like petrol,

when it sees me arrive with my prison features,

and it screeches going by like a scorched tire

and its footsteps tread hot with blood towards night.

And it drives me to certain street corners, certain damp houses,

towards hospitals where skeletons leap from the window,

to certain cobbler’s shops stinking of vinegar,

to alleyways awful as abysses.

There are sulphur-coloured birds and repulsive intestines,

hanging from doorways of houses I hate,

there are lost dentures in coffee pots

there are mirrors

that ought to have cried out from horror and shame,

there are umbrellas everywhere, poisons and navels.

I pass by calmly, with eyes and shoes,

with anger, oblivion,

pass by, cross through offices, orthopaedic stores,

and yards where clothes hang down from wires:

underpants, towels, and shirts, that cry

slow guilty tears.

‘Not for the desert lands alone where the rock-salt’

LXIII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Not for the desert lands alone where the rock-salt

is like a rare rose, the flower interred by the sea,

my journey, but also for banks of rivers carving through snow.

The bitter heights of the Cordilleras knew my footsteps.

Sibilant, tangled, regions of my wild country,

creepers whose mortal kiss chains itself to the forest,

moist lament of the bird that surges up, shedding cool quavers:

oh, country of lost sorrows and pitiless tears!

Not only the poisonous skin of copper,

or the nitrate spread like a frieze, a snowy deposit,

but the vine, the cherry prized by the spring

are mine, and I belong like a dark atom

to the arid lands and the autumn light of the grape,

to this country of metal lifted in towers of snow.

‘Already, you are mine. Rest with your dream inside my dream.’

LXXXI From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Already, you are mine. Rest with your dream inside my dream.

Love, grief, labour, must sleep now.

Night revolves on invisible wheels

and joined to me you are pure as sleeping amber.

No one else will sleep with my dream, love.

You will go we will go joined by the waters of time.

No other one will travel the shadows with me,

only you, eternal nature, eternal sun, eternal moon.

Already your hands have opened their delicate fists

and let fall, without direction, their gentle signs,

you eyes enclosing themselves like two grey wings,

while I follow the waters you bring that take me onwards:

night, Earth, winds weave their fate, and already,

not only am I not without you, I alone am your dream.

‘O Southern Cross, O clover of scented phosphorus,’

LXXXVI From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

O Southern Cross, O clover of scented phosphorus,

with four kisses this day penetrated your beauty

and traversed my hat and the shadows:

the moon went turning round a coldness.

Then, with my love, and my beloved, oh diamonds

of blue frost, serenity of Heaven,

mirror, you appeared, and night filled itself

with your four vaults of trembling wine.

O palpitating silver of fish, pure and polished,

emerald cross, parsley of the radiant shadows,

glow-worm nailed to the unity of Heaven,

rest in me, let us close our eyes, yours and mine.

Sleep with Man’s darkness for an instant.

Light, inside me, your four constellated numbers.

Note: The four main Stars of Crux, the Southern Cross, represent the four unifying and moral Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude, in Catholic tradition. They are ‘numbered’ by the first four letters of the Greek alphabet (α,β,γ,δ) clockwise in the sky, and also represent here both the alphabet, and the outstretched hands and feet of the ‘divine’ man or woman (See the closing verses of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci, of a human figure in the circle of the sun. See also William Blake.), and therefore also the outstretched body of the beloved. Neruda brilliantly combines the four concepts. Note also the structure of four verses, and the repetition of clusters of four metaphors, particularly in verse 3.

‘Day breaks: the whole of yesterday went falling’

XLIX From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Day breaks: the whole of yesterday went falling

among fingers of light and eyes of dream,

tomorrow will arrive with green footsteps:

no one holds back the river of dawn.

No one holds back the river of your hands,

the eyes of your dream, beloved.

You are the tremor of time that runs

between light on end and darkened sunlight.

And the sky closes over you its wings

lifts you and brings you to my arms

with exact, mysterious courtesy.

For this I sing to the day and the moon,

to the sea, to time, to every planet,

to your diurnal voice, to your nocturnal flesh.

‘Through the mountains you pass like the breeze’

XVIII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Through the mountains you pass like the breeze

or the sudden quickening that falls from the snow,

or your hair, throbbing with light, confirms

the high glittering of sun in the thicket.

All the light of the Caucasus falls on your body

as though into a little vase of glass, infinite,

where the water transforms itself, by dressing, by singing

at every transparent move of the river.

Through the mountains the ancient road of warriors

and below it seething, shines like a sword,

water between ramparts of mineral hands,

until you receive from the woods, in a moment,

the branch or lightning flash of some blue flower

and the unknown arrow of a wild fragrance.

‘It’s good to feel you are close to me in the night, love,’

LXXXIII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

It’s good to feel you are close to me in the night, love,

invisible in your sleep, intently nocturnal,

while I untangle my worries

as if they were twisted nets.

Withdrawn, your heart sails through dream,

but your body, relinquished so, breathes

seeking me without seeing me perfecting my dream

like a plant that seeds itself in the dark.

Rising, you will be that other, alive in the dawn,

but from the frontiers lost in the night,

from the presence and the absence where we meet ourselves,

something remains, drawing us into the light of life

as if the sign of the shadows had sealed

its secret creatures with flame.

Plenary Powers

From: ‘Plenos Poderes’

For the sun’s pure power, I write, for the full sea,

for the full and open road, wherever I can I sing,

only the vagrant night detains me

but I gain space in that interruption,

I gain shadow for lengths of time.

Night’s black wheat grows

while my eyes measure the field.

I forge keys from dawn to dusk:

I search for locks in the darkness

and I go throwing open ruined gates to the sea

until the wardrobes are full of foam.

I never tire of going and returning,

death does not stop me with its stone,

I never tire of presence and absence.

Sometimes I ask myself if it was from

my father or my mother or the mountains

I inherited these mineral tasks,

veins of a burning ocean,

and I know I go on, and go on to go on,

and I sing to sing on, and to sing.

Nothing explains what happens

when I close my eyes and circle

as if between two undersea channels,

one lifts me up to die in its branches

and the other sings so I might sing.

So then, I am composed of absence

and akin to the sea that assaults the reef

with its briny globules of whiteness

and takes back the stone into the wave.

So that whatever of death surrounds me

opens in me the window on life

and in the full paroxysm I am sleeping.

To the full light I go on through the shadow.

‘Three birds of the ocean, three rays, three shears,’

LXXXVII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Three birds of the ocean, three rays, three shears,

crossed the cold sky towards Antofagasta,

so that the air was left shivering,

everything shivered like a wounded flag.

Solitude, grant me the sign of your eternal origin,

the barest track of the cruel birds,

and the tremor that without doubt comes before

the honey, the music, the sea, the birth.

(Solitude, sustained by a changeless face

like a heavy flower continually spreading

until it embraces the pure seethe of the sky.)

They flew, cold wings of the ocean, of the Archipelago

towards the sand of Northeast Chile.

And the night bolted home its heavenly bolt.

Note: Antofagasta is the mountainous desert province of North-central Chile, Northeast of the southern Archipelago.

‘Glorious Mind, bright daemon’

LIV From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Glorious Mind, bright daemon

of absolute clusters, of honest noon,

here we are at last, without solitude and alone,

far from the delirium of the savage city.

When the pure line surrounds its dove

and the fire honours peace with its fuel

you and I exalt this heavenly outcome.

Mind and Love live naked in this house.

Furious dreams, rivers of bitter certainty,

decisions harder than the sleep of a hammer

fell into the double glass of the lovers,

until the Twins, Mind and Love,

were lifted on the scale like two wings.

Like this the Transparency built itself.

‘Amor, Amor, the clouds in the sky’s tower’

XXIV From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Amor, Amor, the clouds in the sky’s tower

mounted like triumphant purifying fountains,

and all glowed blue, all was star-like:

sea, boat, day, fused and banished.

Come and see the cherries of water that appeared,

and the whole scale of the swift universe,

come and touch the fire of the blue instant,

come before its petals are consumed.

Nothing here lacks light, number, clusters,

space opened up by the wind’s virtues,

until it delivers the sea-foam’s last secret.

And among so many blues, celestial, submerged,

our eyes are lost barely divining

the powers of air, the underwater gushers.

A Memory

From: ‘Las manos de dia’

Memory, in the wheat-field’s centre

one purple poppy

even more silken than silk

and with a snake’s aroma.

The rest was the roughness

of cut and golden wheat.

I have been tangled there, more than once

beside a thresher

with a wild apple

opened by sex and sudden

and in the threshed straw remained

an odour of semen and moon.

The Word

From: ‘Plenos poderes’

It was born

in blood, the word

grew in the dark body, beating

and flew through the lips and the mouth.

Further, and nearer

still, still it came

from dead fathers, nomadic races,

from lands made of stone,

that were tired of their wretched tribes,

because when pain set out on the way

the villages walked and arrived

and new earth and water joined again

to sow their words anew.

And so this is the legacy:

this is the air which connects us

to the dead man and the dawn

of new beings not yet woken.

The atmosphere still trembles

with the first word

formed

in panic and moans.

It rose

from the shadows

and even now no thunder

yet thunders with the clang

of that word

the first

word spoken:

perhaps it was only a sigh, a drop,

and yet its cascade falls and falls.

Then sense fills the word.

The word was made pregnant and filled with lives.

It was all births and cries:

affirmation, clarity, force,

negation, destruction, death:

the verb assumed all those powers

and merged existence and essence

in the electricity of her beauty.

Word, human, syllabic, pelvis

of wide light and solid silver,

hereditary cup that receives

the communication of blood:

here is where silence was fused

in the total human word

and not to speak is to be dying among beings:

language springs from the roots of the hair,

the mouth talks without the lips moving:

the eyes of a sudden are words.

I take the word and traverse it

as if it were solely human form,

its lineaments delight me and I fly

through each resonance of language:

I pronounce and I am and I reach without speech

the silence at the end of words.

I drink to the word, lifting

a word or a glass of crystal,

in it I drink

the wine of language

or the interminable waters

maternal fount of words,

and glass and water and wine

originate my song

because the verb is the origin

and the living channel: it is blood

the blood that speaks its substance

and so is ready to flow:

giving crystal to crystal, blood to blood

and giving life to life, the words.

Note: Verse 4. Claridad was a student revolutionist review published in Santiago. Neruda wrote articles for it weekly during the 1920's. Chile's political situation was in turmoil at the time. Arturo Alessandri Palma became President of the Republic, which defused his revolutionary politics. Luis Emilio Recabarren, a working-class leader and organizer, set up union centers, and workers' newspapers etc. There was massive unemployment throughout Chile. Neruda writes that from then on, politics became a part of his poetry and his life.

Too Many Names

From: ‘Estravagario’

Monday entangles itself with Tuesday

and the week with the year:

time cannot be severed

with your weary shears,

and all the names of the day

the water of night clears.

No man can call himself Peter,

no woman Rose or Mary,

we are all sand or dust,

we are all rain in the rain.

They have told me of Venezuelas,

Paraguays and Chiles,

I don’t know what they’re talking about:

I know the skin of the Earth

and I know that it has no name.

When I lived among roots

they delighted me more than flowers,

and when I talked to a stone

it echoed like a bell.

It is so slow the spring

that lasts the winter long:

time has lost his shoes:

one year’s four centuries.

When I go to sleep each night

what am I called, not called?

And when I wake up, who am I

if it wasn’t ‘I’ who was sleeping?

This is to say that as soon as we

are thrust out into life,

that we come newly born,

that our mouths are not filled

with all these dubious names,

with all these mournful labels,

with all these meaningless letters,

with all this ‘yours’ and ‘mine’,

with all this signing of papers.

I think to confound things

mingling them, hatching them new,

seeing through them, stripping them naked,

until the light of the earth

has the unity of the ocean,

a generous integrity,

a crackle of starched perfume.

‘The heavy rain of the south falls over Isla Negra’

LXVII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

The heavy rain of the south falls over Isla Negra

like a solitary drop transparent and weighty:

the sea opens its cool leaves to receive it:

the earth learns the wet fate of the glass.

My soul, grant me in your kisses the briny

water of these months, the honey of the region,

the fragrance moistened by the sky’s thousand lips,

the sacred patience of the sea in winter.

Something calls us: all the doors open by themselves,

the water tells a great story to the window-panes,

the sky extends down to touch the roots,

and like this the day weaves and unweaves its celestial net

with time, salt, murmurs, growth, pathways,

a woman, a man, and winter on the Earth.

‘My love, at the shutting of this door of night’

LXXXII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

My love, at the shutting of this door of night

I ask of you, love, a journey through a dark pound:

shut out your dreams: enter with your sky my eyes:

stretch out in my blood as if in a wide river.

Goodbye, goodbye, cruel clarity that was dropped

into the bag of every day of the past:

goodbye to every gleam of clocks or oranges:

welcome oh shadow, periodic friend!

In this boat, or water, or death, or new life,

one more time we unite, slumbering, resurrected:

we are the marriage of the night in the blood.

I don’t know who lives or dies, sleeps or wakes,

but it is your heart that delivers,

to my chest, the gifts of the dawn.

Night Sea

From: ‘Canto general’

Night sea, statue of white and green

I love you: sleep with me. I travelled all

the roads, calcined and dying,

nature grew with me, Man

overcame his ashes, prepared himself

for rest, surrounded by the Earth.

Night fell so that your eyes

could not see his miserable slumber:

needing nearness, he opened his arms

protected by beings and walls,

and fell into the sleep of silence, sinking

with his roots into the funereal earth.

I, night ocean, to your open form,

to your expanse that Aldebaran guards,

to the wet mouth of your song

came with the love that builds me.

I saw you, night of the sea, when you were born

beaten into infinite nacre:

I watched the starry threads woven,

and the electricity at your waist,

and the blue motion of the sounds

that hound your devoured sweetness.

Love me without love, flagrant wife.

Love me with space, with the river

of your breathing, with the increase

of all your overflowing diamonds:

love me without respite from your aspect,

grant me the honesty of your breakers.

Beautiful, you are, beloved night, beautiful:

you keep the tempest like a bee

slumbering among your agitated stamens,

dream and water tremble in the hollows

of your breasts, harassed by slopes.

Nocturnal love, I followed what you raised,

your eternity, the trembling tower

that assumes the stars, the measure

of your wavering, the villages

that the spume raises on your flanks:

I am fastened to your throat

and to the lips that you bruise on the sand.

Who are you? Night of the seas, tell me

whether your heights of hair cover

all solitude, whether it is infinite

this space of blood and prairies.

Tell me who you are, full of boats,

full of moons the wind crushes,

mistress of all metals, rose

of the depths, rose drenched

by the harsh weather of naked love.

Earth’s tunic, green statue,

grant me a wave like a bell,

grant me a wave of furious orange blossom,

the crowd of bonfires, the boats

of the sky’s capital, the water where I sail

the crowds of celestial fire. I want one

moment of expansiveness, and more than

all dreams, your remoteness:

all the purples you measure, your grave

pensive, constellated system:

all your hair touched

by darkness, and the dawn you prepare.

I want to contain your simultaneous brow,

unfurling it within me, to be born

on all your shores, to go now

with all the secrets breathed,

with your shadow lines kept safe

in me like blood or flags,

carrying these secret measures

to the sea of every day, to the battles

in every gateway – loves and threats –

that live slumbering.

But then

I will enter the city with as many eyes

as you, and I will bear the garment

with which you invested me, and may I be moved

to the furthest reaches of measureless water:

by purity and rage against every deathliness,

remoteness that cannot be exhausted, music

for those who slumber and those who wake.

Ode to Clothes

From ‘Odas elementales’

Every morning you wait,

clothes, over a chair,

to fill yourself with

my vanity, my love,

my hope, my body.

Barely

risen from sleep,

I relinquish the water,

enter your sleeves,

my legs look for

the hollows of your legs,

and so embraced

by your indefatigable faithfulness

I rise, to tread the grass,

enter poetry,

consider through the windows,

the things,

the men, the women,

the deeds and the fights

go on forming me,

go on making me face things

working my hands,

opening my eyes,

using my mouth,

and so,

clothes,

I too go forming you,

extending your elbows,

snapping your threads,

and so your life expands

in the image of my life.

In the wind

you billow and snap

as if you were my soul,

at bad times

you cling

to my bones,

vacant, for the night,

darkness, sleep

populate with their phantoms

your wings and mine.

I wonder

if one day

a bullet

from the enemy

will leave you stained with my blood

and then

you will die with me

or one day

not quite

so dramatic

but simple,

you will fall ill,

clothes,

with me,

grow old

with me, with my body

and joined

we will enter

the earth.

Because of this

each day

I greet you

with reverence and then

you embrace me and I forget you,

because we are one

and we will go on

facing the wind, in the night,

the streets or the fight,

a single body,

one day, one day, some day, still.

‘Misfortunes of the month of January’

XLI From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Misfortunes of the month of January when indifferent

noon establishes its equation in the sky,

a solid gold like wine in an overflowing glass

fills the earth to its blue limits.

Misfortunes of this time, appearing like tiny grapes

that bunch together in green bitterness,

confused, secret tears of the days,

until the elements divulge their clusters.

Yes, seeds, grief, everything that pulses

terrified, in the crackling light of January,

will ripen, ferment, as the fruit ferments.

The sorrows will be divided: the soul

give a gasp of air, and the dwelling-place

will be left clean, with fresh-made bread on the table.

I Explain a Few Things

From: ‘Tercera Residencia’

You will ask: ‘And where are the lilacs?

And the metaphysics covered with poppies?

And the rain that often beat down

filling its words

with holes and birds.’

To you I am going to tell all that happened to me.

I lived in a quarter

in Madrid, with bells

with clocks, with trees.

From there could be seen

the dry face of Castille

like a sea of leather.

My house was named

the house of the flowers, because everywhere

geraniums exploded: it was

a beautiful house

with dogs and little children.

Raúl, you agree?

You agree, Rafael?

Federico, you agree

beneath the earth,

you agree about my house with balconies where

the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?

Brother, brother!

All

was loud voices, salt of wares,

agglomerations of pulsating bread,

the markets of my quarter of Argüelles with its statue

like a pallid inkwell amongst the hake:

the olive oil flowed into spoons

a deep pounding

of feet and hands filled the streets,

metres, litres, sharp

essence of life,

stacked fish,

the build of roofs with a cold sun on which

the weathervane tires,

the fine frenzied ivory of potatoes,

tomatoes multiplied down to the sea.

And one morning all of that burned

and one morning the bonfires

leapt from the earth

devouring beings,

and from that moment fire

gunpowder from that moment,

and from that moment blood.

Thugs with planes, and the Moors,

thugs with signet rings, and duchesses,

thugs with black friars blessing

came through the sky to slaughter children,

and through the streets the blood of the children

flowed easily, like the blood of children.

Jackals that the jackal would drive away,

stones that the dry thistle would bite and spit out,

vipers that the vipers would hate!

Opposed to you I have seen the blood

of Spain rise up

to drown you, in a single wave

of pride and knives!

Generals

traitors:

consider my dead house,

consider Spain, broken:

but from every dead house burning metal flows

in place of flowers,

but from every hollow of Spain

Spain rises,

but from every dead child rises a gun with eyes,

but from every crime are born bullets

that will find you one day in the house

of the heart.

You will ask why his poetry

has nothing of the earth, of the leaves,

of the grand volcanoes of his native country?

Come and see the blood through the streets,

come and see

the blood through the streets,

come and see the blood

through the streets!

Note. Federico is Federico Garcia Lorca, the poet, assassinated in the early days of the Spanish. Civil War, whom Neruda knew. Rafael is the poet Rafael Alberti.